Look, I know it sounds mad today, but in the earliest days of Web 2.0 it seemed like a perfectly natural thing to do, okay. You’d go out, take snaps of you enjoying your evening, and then upload them to Facebook the next morning, tagging your friends in the images and sharing them for everyone to see. (Remember when Facebook was a walled-off network for college students only? Imagine where we’d be if that mission statement had never changed.) Now, our social lives re-ordered themselves to cope with the novelty such a platform provided. It wouldn’t be long after the K750i launched that Facebook would arrive in the UK and, soon after, open itself up to our university. The ability to have a camera, one good enough to take pictures that you can be proud of, was revelatory. But the images, as you can see, were certainly not the worst, especially with a camera of this class: It had a fixed f/2.8 aperture and only outputted JPEG images, compromises you’d expect with a device of this type. 1/3.2” is still seen as a good sensor size for a smartphone in 2021, and 2.8 microns is larger than Sony’s most prestigious point-and-shoot today, the RX100 VII. The K750i’s camera used a CMOS sensor measuring 1/3.2” with relatively large pixels, measuring at 2.8 microns, producing pictures with a resolution of 1,632 x 1,224. Two megapixels wasn’t a lot, but it was the sort of figure where images were high quality enough that you could, if you wanted, print them out. Between Sony and Nokia, the mobile phone world would soon embark upon a megapixel arms race that dogs the industry to this day. Especially since most other manufacturers were still rocking VGA cameras, like on the outrageously-popular original Motorola Razr, or at best, 1.3-megapixel lenses. ![]() But there was something about Sony’s implementation that seemed better than any of those rival devices. Sony didn’t invent the camera phone, and Nokia had already launched the N90, shaped like a camcorder, before the K750i dropped. Two of my friends bought pricey 3G phones and plans on the promise that you could watch TV on your phone over the internet. ![]() And while it had abandoned a buzzy feature like 3G, the handset neatly sidestepped the pointless arms race that defined the standard in its earliest days. The K750i sold around 15 million units in its first two years and established Sony Ericsson as a company that could, on its day, stand toe-to-toe with (then champion) Nokia. It didn’t have 3G, however, something which would keep the cost down, and make it one of the most popular handsets of the day. The proprietary memory card, non-standard headphone connector and the custom file formats frustrated as much as they delighted. Of course, it was a Sony phone, so every component was an attempt to railroad you into its ecosystem. It even shipped with a 64MB Memory Stick Duo, enabling you to store plenty of photos on it before you had to transfer them to your computer. But here was Sony (Ericsson, admittedly) effectively giving me a digital camera for free.įor its size, and its age, the K750i was remarkably powerful, since it could play audio files, videos and send data via its infrared port. This was just about affordable for me, and would be my first real chance to own a digital point-and-shoot, since I could have never justified owning one otherwise. In 2005, when it launched, carriers ate the cost of the phones to keep you tied to their plans, and we bought 50 minutes of calls and 100 text messages for £7 ($13) a month. The woman who’d go on to become my wife and I both bagged a K750i in some sort of deal for probably £20 (about $36 back then) upfront. Sony knew that phones would wind up eating cameras, but couldn’t make good on its foresight in the smartphone age. ![]() It was designed to behave like a camera, with a slide-open shutter cover (and I love a slider) which launched the imaging mode - it even had a dedicated shutter button. Sony, who was (and still is) master of the point-and-shoot, had managed to cram a modest point-and-shoot into a handset only slightly bigger than its predecessor, the T610. The candybar phone was one of the first to come with a proper camera, packing two whole megapixels of power inside its body. The Sony Ericsson K750i was a marvel in its day and, even now, sixteen years later, stands as a key step on the path to the era of smartphone photography. On the company’s 75th anniversary, we’ve put together a series of articles about our experiences with some of its more interesting and unusual products. From its ‘My First Sony’ range to early cameraphones, virtual reality headsets to Digital Audio Tapes, Sony has always tried new things, with varying degrees of success. After its beginnings making tape recorders and transistor radios, it rapidly expanded into myriad industries. On May 7th, 1946, Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita founded ’Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo’, the company that would later become Sony.
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